Can web performance and user experience co-exist?

Even gamers who have no clue about the particulars and internals of the Cloud, SaaS, or  website performance monitoring know all about latency, which is nothing more than performance lag. Latency is usually the byproduct of the incredible system resources demanded by graphics software that renders detailed universes. High latency is marked by breakdowns in the graphics. Frames of animation disappear, or a character’s actions take a crucial second or two to manifest from user action to the rendering onscreen. That second or two is often the difference between virtual life and death for the wannbe Solider of Fortune. Talk about a poor user experience!

Web performance issues like this leave gamers with a dilemma: Option One – Maintain decent performance by reducing the clarity of the graphics and other bells and whistles that enhance if not make the user experience for certain games.

You are also almost guaranteed to have major latency issues, marked by jerky movements, missing frames, or even a system hang. And that’s if you’re playing standalone. When playing against multiple adversaries over the network, it can get ugly.

Source: Keynote Blog

Potential Opportunity For SaaS Solutions

It is a truism that many of us tech-savvy types (myself included) often forget that many people and organizations are not downloading major releases of an application the week they are released for a variety of reasons: potential security concerns regarding the application, cost of the application, comfort level, or even the cost in man-hours of the work involved in a free upgrade. For many people in the workplace, their best performing applications are often running on their home machine.

That is not a trivial issue in a world where SaaS solutions are being evaluated. After all, in the cloud, the browser can be the weakest link in your web  performance chain, and IE6 wasn’t designed with SaaS in mind, which could put off potential cloud customers.

Read more, also take a glimpse at SaaS service provider solutions to monitor website.

Importance of transaction monitoring and web site performance

The number of online transactions has multiplied significantly over the past decade with the increasing
use of dynamic pages, secure Web sites, integrated search capabilities, and multimedia content.
At the same time, transactions have become more complex. A single transaction, such as buying
a book, often involves a number of intricate sub-transactions. The customer loads a dynamically
generated Web page that is customized for his or her buying preferences, then searches the inventory,
chooses from results, adds a book to an electronic shopping cart, provides shipping and payment
information, confirms the purchase, and receives a shipping tracking number.

Organizations must take an active role in transaction monitoring the performance of all sorts of online transactions—
from making purchases to downloading forms. Yet the task of pinpointing problems has become more
challenging as transactions have increased in complexity. The web site performance and the success
of online transactions depend on a wide range of interconnected technologies.

Source: http://www.keynote.com/docs/whitepapers/MonitorOnlineTx.pdf

Web Performance Enhancements

In the never-ending desire for optimal web performance, the bottlenecks are many. For the end-user experience to be a rich, stress-free one, performance needs to be optimal along all parts of the chain but especially at the point of truth, the browser. So there was some buzz when earlier this week, Cisco unveiled their newest router, the CRS-3.

The ultimate improvement in user experience is a direct result of the front end/browser performance. Google’s Steve Souders showed that in most cases less than 20% of the end user response time is spent getting the HTML document back. He stated: “If you magically cut the back end response time by half (which would take an incredible amount of work), you would cut 5-10% off of the end user response time. On the other hand, if you can get the front end response time by half, the end user response time can be improved by forty to fifty percent. (Emphasis mine)

With that in mind note this look at the performance of the five leading browsers. Note that while Safari (which is run on the iPhone) rates fairly well in some areas, its page load time is pedestrian at best and browser cache time is really slow. These are areas where optimization could play a big role.

Read more at http://blogs.keynote.com/the_watch/website-performance-monitoring/